Sunday, October 23, 2011

Recycling

Some years ago I bought a pastel drawing by a local artist at auction. I like the ethereal, insubstantial quality to the portrait, but the frame, clearly chosen by some genteel old lady in the 1980s, was so ugly that I kept it in the spare room.

But I recently bit the bullet and had it reframed. And, being a thrifty person, I had the framer install the Evil Monkeys picture from my lightbox into the old frame. I was then going to paint it, but it turns out that the silver in the frame echoes the gleaming plastic in the photograph, and it looks pretty cool. With art, context is everything.

Meanwhile the new frame for the portrait is taller, with a bigger, plain white mat and a simple wood frame. The wider mat prevents the frame from visually blocking the image - its white spaces bleed out into mat and better express its serene simplicity.

2 Comments:

I have tonnes of photos that await framing, but I can't be arsed to make it happen. I also have some pictures that for which my wife bought a frame, but she took those cheap glass-pane-with-clips things, plus they are really the wrong size. All this pushes me deeper into my frame-depression, and I see no way out.